Like what obtains in other professions, web developers must have certain rudimentary skills in other to survive the stiff competition for proficient professionals. This is the first edition of a four part series to get you started by showing you the basic building blocks which must be in place in other to guarantee your success, if you intend to become a professional website developer.
Many of the people who come into the profession these days begin by learning CMS (such as WordPress, Joomla, Drupal, Wix, etc.) and various frameworks that make the job a lot easier. These web design and development tools are good. They enable you develop intuitive websites and deliver quickly. Nevertheless, if you really want to be a sound professional that will make it real big and be able to handle big projects, you must not skip the basics. The stability of a building depends on the strength of its foundation. So first things first. Don’t skip the basics. Otherwise you cannot become an outstanding professional.
So, what are the basic or foundational skills? The answer is simple. You need to first learn the three languages upon which great websites are built. They are:
- HTML – Hypertext Markup Language
- CSS – Cascading Style Sheets
- JS – JavaScript
There are many frameworks and content management systems (CMS) which are used for building websites; but a lot of people don’t realize that they are mostly based on these foundational languages. Therefore learning these languages first will actually make you more effective in the use of the frameworks and CMSes.
In this series we shall shed light on each of these languages. Check back next week for part two in which we will talk about HTML.